I watched Body of Lies this week and would agree with Tony's original point to a certain extent.

I consider myself to be a prime candidate for following and accepting the convoluted twists and turns involving intelligence outfits playing off against each other, but at times I found the possibilities a tad difficult to follow.

We had to pause and rewind quite a few times to try and figure out the significance of dialogue and what possibly could be going on. Various differences of opinion attested to the many possibilities of a given point in the plot.

Technically, it was a little hard to believe de Caprio's character at times, especially when he was in the company of the head of Jordanian intel.

There were a couple of scenes depicting urban Jihadists, sweating over home made bombs and then blowing themselves up in buildings when the cops broke in and another blowing himself up with a suicide vest. All of which confirmed their necessary evil as the counterpoint to the CIA's necessary evil that was to follow.

The main "revelation" from a false flag terrorism pov, imo, was the CIA's de Caprio's idea that a good way to catch the film's Al Q top man would be to create another terrorist out of thin air and then plant a few bombs that could be attributed to him.

How would this strategy catch the Al Q top man ?

Why, it would appeal to his vanity of course, arouse his interest that someone other than himself was letting off "terrorist" bombs in Europe and so "force" him to contact the stooge in who's name the CIA were doing the bombings and thereby flush Mr Al Q out into the open.

They selected a suitable candidate, an architect, who was then covertly inveigled into a false construction project so that surveillance photographs could be taken and leaked, as well as a supportive money trail of donations to "the Jihadist cause", so as to set him up without him knowing it.

It worked of course. Not least because they knew that certain messages put out about the bombings by the English IT / Comms spook would be picked up by Saudi intel and leaked to Al Q.

In the course of all of that were the bits you had to try to figure out, such as, who was working for who, which "inside" Jihadist was working for who and the relationships between the CIA and Jordanian intelligence.

There was of course the obligatory love interest between de Caprio and a local Muslim nurse, which, one has to assume, was one of the reasons de Caprio finally decided to quit the CIA at the end of the film because he had found love in a loveless place, the Middle East where, according to Russell Crowe's character there is nothing good.

The other reason was that de Caprio, you know the Machiavellian CIA agent who proposed the false flag bombing campaign in the first place, finally let his conscience get to him after he was used by the Jordanian's to flush out Mr Al Q and after enduring a little bit of torture.

The point ?

The CIA can create a false flag bombing campaign and attribute it to a patsy, but only to flush out the bad guy.

I'm not a film buff by any stretch, so take this with a pinch of salt and maybe there was some stuff I missed, but, I found it a little convoluted, even for my cynical ears and eyes.

Perhaps that's the way you can get a film out there on this subject matter in Hollywood, by wrapping it up in a "bad outweighs the good", the end justifies the means packaging.

I'm wondering about the various messages in the film and how they would have been perceived by audiences from the "haven't got a clue about false flag terrorism" faction and then on the other extreme, folk such as I who are competely open to that paradigm.

For the former, I'm not so sure that any intended message, if indeed it was Ridley-Scotts intention, about flase flag terrrorism, would hit the spot, given that it was packaged as a necessary evil.

For those who are already up to speed with such craft, I don't think it added anything much at all really. Otoh, it may well have provoked some thought for some, maybe, even, "oh yeah, I saw that in a movie" ...

One interesting point was the use of already dead, unclaimed cadavers at the US military base where one of the CIA bombs went off, as supposed victims of a terrorist bombing ...

Great film this.
They wouldn't allow them to film it in the Middle East due to its political content!_________________--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."

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